How do I change primary drive to my new 340G SSD?

[Tak]

Already installed windows and tried changing boot options in bios. It let me put the ssd first but then after two reboots it changed itself back. In the storage drive manager it shows the old hdd as the 'system/boot/primary' drive. How do I get this all changed over to the ssd so I can retire my old 1TB hdd to storage?

 

[Night Hawk]

Hello Tak Welcome to the Seven Forums!

The first thought would be swapping sata cables or the port the cable is plugged into on the board so that the SSD is then seen as Disk 0 if the board itself is strictly all Sata II or Sata III. That will force the bios to look to that drive when set as the default for the OS install there.

Typically when multiple drives are installed simply moving the boot drive upto the top of the list will see the OS install load automatically. Where you have a mix of Sata II and Sata III ports however the S3 first drive will tend to become Disk 0 when viewed using the Disk Part tool.

When going to install Windows you may have to unplug the other OS drive(s) to avoid seeing the mbr entries, boot files, BCD store end up on the wrong drive. This is why it is generally the best move to simply unplug the other drive(s) present when needed to insure a stand alone install.

 

[gregrocker]

Did you unplug all other HD's during install to the SSD as you must to avoid having it write the System boot files to the first HD or first Active partition?

It appears that the only System Active drive in the screenshot is DISK0 HDD signifying it holds the System boot files for all OS's now.

I'd mark the SSD Active, then if possible swap DISK0 data cable to the SSD, unplug all other HD's, boot the Win7 DVD or System Repair Disk to run Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times until SSD is boots, is marked System Active showing it has its own boot files.

SSD should also boot as C unless you also incorrectly ran the installer from another OS which locked out C. If so I would unplug all other HD's, plug SSD into first SATA port to do a Clean Install Windows 7

 

[Night Hawk]

When first going to put this case together and wanting to try 7 out on a Sata III drive i had to unplug the two Sata II models first to avoid any boot file misplacement. Yet when going to install a clean install of 7 later on the first Sata II drive nothing had to be unplugged as it was plugged into the #1 sata port on the board. For the second and other drives however the first then next drive in order would have to be unplugged to see Windows on drive 2 or drive 3 unplgging 1+2 and then unplugging the first S3 drive as well as the two Sata II drives to OS the number #4 second S3 drive.

Does that sound confusing? For each drive second to one before it you unplug the first to install a stand alone to the second. This was even more pronounced when installing Windows on any sata drive when an ide hard drive is present! EIDE on the older systems as well as the new would automatically override sata! Fortunately most only use the single ide channel now seen on boards for an optical drive or two.(dvd, blue ray, etc.)

I have to wonder if you ran into the need to rebuild the BCD store new on the SSD manually in case you ended up seeing the boot files and mbr end up on the first 1tb C drive there. That's precisely what both greg and I am seeing as why you are having the boot issues. Besides another clean install you can also try to rebuild the BCD and boot sector manually if you prefer. The MS page explaining how to use the bootrec tool at a command prompt can be seen at Use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows

One of the guides here besides using the Startup repair tool deploys the bootrec tool to fix bootmgr missing problems as well as using the same commands to build a new mbr and BCD store. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/104341-bootmgr-missing-fix.html